On Christmas morning in 1954 my brother James and I awoke to find, by the Christmas tree, a new bicycle for me and a new toboggan for him. My immediate reaction was a powerful sense of dread. Our father was a frugal man, and such gifts were totally out of character for him.

A year earlier our mother had a radical mastectomy. Our father told me the doctors thought they had gotten all the cancer, but in recent weeks our mother had been sleeping in a special chair Dad had placed in their bedroom. At times at night I heard her cry out in pain. Less than 4 weeks after Christmas I was called out of class at West High School, where I was a 14 year old junior. James and I were brought to the hospital to "say goodbye" to our mother. Her face was a waxy yellow, and she seemed unconscious of the presence of anyone in her room. Our older brother Douglas had been summoned to Minneapolis, and the next morning he told me our mother had died.

My 15th birthday was 3 weeks later. Neither I nor anyone else seemed to remember it. A short time later I went to a barber shop for a haircut. The barber asked how old I was, since he charged more for boys once they reached 15. After a long pause I realized I couldn't remember whether I was 14 or 15, and I gave him the wrong answer.

On the last day of 1949 our family spent the night in a hotel or motel in Minneapolis as newly arrived Canadian emigrants. The following day was our first in our new home in a new country. The house was at 1804 Humboldt Ave. Though it looked dingy on the outside, the inside showed it had been an upper crust residence, with servants' quarters on the 3rd floor and a small building in back that must once have been a stable, with a hayloft above, now converted to a garage with a large sliding door for a single car. That first winter we had no car, and Dad sprayed water on the garage floor to make a small skating rink for us kids.

In front the house had a large screen porch with windows looking out onto it from the front entryway, the living room and, in between, my Dad's office and library. One wall of that last room was covered by bookshelves almost floor to ceiling. I say almost because at the very bottom was a row of single drawers just tall enough for the hundreds of black and white photo prints, standing on edge, that my dad had taken over the years. He devoted one drawer entirely to these prints. If we'd had a fire, that drawer might have been the first thing we saved.

There was no fire, but in January 1955 my mother died, and in September 1955 Dad remarried. Evelyn was Dad's 3rd wife. At age 42 she had never been married, but it was years before us kids were allowed to know her age. Her arrival meant major changes in our household. The living room was re-carpeted and made off limits to my brothers and I. The picture of our older sister Betty from Dad's first marriage, taken about the time she graduated from high school, which had hung on the wall at the foot of the stairs for years, came down. Word reaching us kids was that Evelyn did not want visitors to know that Dad had been married before. Then the day came when, while Dad was out of the house, I discovered the wastebasket in the library full of his black and white prints. Never one to throw things away, I was sorely tempted to salvage at least some of the prints. When she heard about it later Betty said she would have given her eye teeth for them. But I expected Dad would be angry if I interfered with his decision to dispose of this large part of our family history. He did save out a few prints for us kids in which we or our mother appeared.

On the question of what I would save if my house was on fire, photo prints of course come to mind. There are two small drawers of prints in the bedroom that could be pulled out and saved, and there are 5 photo albums with color prints from the years before digital photography. The album cover colors, progressing through the years, are brown, green, red, white and blue. But these prints would not be top priority since I have gone through them and scanned many for inclusion in our Park Family Scrapbook website. What have not been digitally preserved are family 8 mm films and audio cassettes. There are 6 of the 8 mm film reels, starting in 1981. While these reels include a few movie sections, they for the most part contain single shots, serving like a low resolution version of digital photography. There are hundreds of frames of family members and places we visited where we may have no other photographic record. There are also animation sequences produced by a young Robin (my oldest son).

Audio cassettes include concerts and music performances by family members and a series of recordings of the kids. The latter cassettes were numbered from 1 to 55, starting in 1979 and continuing until 1990. However, in preparing to write this story, I have been so far unable to locate tapes 19 through 50. Hopefully some even deeper digging will turn them up before the house burns down.

Also on hand are 8 3-inch size audio reels on which my sons made some recordings on my reel-to-reel machine in the 1980s. We would also want to save those until digital copies are made. I have placed these, the numbered audio cassettes found, and the 8 mm movie reels in a small red suitcase under a dresser in the bedroom, easy to spot and grab in case of a fire. Other things I would want to grab are the 3 external hard drives connected to my computer. One has our radio station music library, currently containing 97,313 music files.

I will start this story with two pictures taken in Brownsville Ontario, the little farming village where I was born. These baby pictures show two proud parents, my mother and my father, but the two babies are not the same. My father is holding me when I was 4 months old, but my mother is holding 4½ month old Winnifred, her first born, the sister I never knew. Winnifred's picture was taken in August. In November she came down with pneumonia, and despite treatment with steaming, oxygen and sulphanilamide injections, she died in early December, 1938. I arrived in February 1940.

In my earliest memory I am lying in my crib with a white sheet across the top and and down the sides. The light coming in from above suggests that it is a sunny day in the outside world. I must have told my mother about the memory, and she probably explained that steam was being let into the enclosed area. With Winnifred's death still fresh in their memories, my parents probably worried over any sign of respiratory infection in me. I may have gotten the steam tent treatment more than once. Perhaps at an early age I was already experiencing vasomotor rhinitis, my lifelong incurable (but largely harmless) disease commonly known as the runny nose disease.

From an early age I hated to see things wasted, and I have long been turned off by the materialism promoted by advertisements on television and in other media. For me the best advertisements are ones that make fun of advertising, or ones that unintentionally go wrong. For example, I remember a live car commercial on local TV where the pitchman was extolling the headroom in the car he was advertising. To illustrate, he opened the car door and got in, promptly bumping his head on the door frame as he sat down. The disgusted look on his face was priceless. Then there was the mock ad prompted by the fact that some detergent commercials on black and white TV used white and blue shirts to illustrate that the detergent you were supposed to buy got one shirt whiter than the competitor's product. The mock pitchman held up the two shirts and asked a volunteer "which shirt is whiter, Mrs. Jones?" She pointed at the wrong one and said "the blue one," then asked "when will this appear on TV?" The pitchman's weary response was "not for a long time, Mrs. Jones." Then there was the car ad on national TV, for Ramblers I think. A gang of youths was surrounding a new model while the leader extolled its virtues, saying "take this for example," indicating the bumper or some other part. A gang member immediately put his hands on the part and had to be told "not now dummy." That ad disappeared from TV quite quickly.

However, being deeply distrustful of advertising is not the main reason I hate shopping. That comes from personal experience, especially during the Christmas shopping I felt obligated to do as a youth. I picked a serving spoon that was the wrong pattern, chose a tie my older brother would be embarrassed to wear, etc. Once I bought a rubber pad that I noticed his old car needed by the gas pedal, only to find that he had bought himself just such a pad before Christmas. He made a show of pulling out his new pad and sticking mine in, but that did not alleviate my embarrassment.

To this day, I find it far more satisfying to reuse something old than to buy something new.

Delhi, Ontario

The first 9 years of my life were spent in Ontario, first in the small farming village in southern Ontario where I was born, then in a city not far from Toronto, and finally farther north in a town on the Ottawa River that had been newly constructed for the families of workers at Canada's first nuclear reactor. During those years the most common destination for our family vacation trips was the town of Delhi Ontario where my mother's parents lived. Their property was adjacent to a railroad line, and the passing trains are the first thing I think of when I remember those visits. Initially, at night a passing train would wake me up, but I soon became accustomed to the sound and was disappointed when I found I was sleeping through it. The rail line was on raised ground, and during the day us kids would wave up at the locomotive engineers when a train came through. We were delighted when they noticed and waved down to us. The Delhi house was also memorable for the smell of baking bread. It was something my grandmother seemed to be doing every time we visited. Then there was the railroad underpass for the road in front of the house. It was so narrow that only one car could pass through at a time, and it was hard to see if a car was approaching from the other side. As a result, the standard procedure was to honk your horn before entering to let any other approaching driver know you were coming.

These visits continued on occasion even after our family moved to Minnesota. There was one visit when I was really into seeing, at age 13, how high I could jump.  I set a sawhorse out in the yard and started piling things on top of it. My little brother Warren got into the act by getting under the sawhorse on hands and knees. The result was the photo you see of me flying through the air which I guess my father took.

Delhi was also the site of another memorable experience, my first time driving a car. Across a large flat area from the house was a garage which, at one time, must have been a stable with a hay loft above. There was an unpaved circular area where my grandfather could turn his big old Dodge around. He showed me how to start the car and shift it into first gear with the long handled floor mounted shift lever. He let me drive the car around and around the circle for a few minutes on my own. A photo of the tall garage is featured on the cover of a book by my cousin Judith as you can see here. Unfortunately our last visit to this house was not a happy one. By then Grandmother was suffering from dementia. After Grandfather welcomed us into the house I overheard Grandmother angrily asking him "Who are these people?" She did not recognize anyone in her daughter's family.

Port Rowan, Ontario

After Grandmother Leonard died in 1959 Grandfather moved into the house in rural Port Rowan built by their youngest son Wesley, and the house in Delhi was sold. Grandfather died in 1964. In the years that followed Wesley's house became our Leonard family destination in Ontario. On one occasion my wife Barbara noticed that a storm had broken a tree trunk, causing it to tilt over the driveway high above. It was threatening to come down on Wesley's car in the driveway right below it. When she told Wesley he went out and moved the car in time. The trunk soon crashed down as shown at right.

Wesley was a mechanic and had a collection of old vehicles on his property. One was Grandfather's old Dodge, the first car I had diven. (I snapped a picture of it with my oldest son Robin.)

One of the last visits to Port Roway was for the memorial service for Wesley's wife Irene after she died in 2005. At the reception some people who had not seen Wesley for a time mistook me for him, since we both had long hair and a beard. Our final visit to the Port Rowan house was after Wesley died in 2009. We were among the cousins who helped their son Jonathon clear out the house. Jonathon, using his middle name Craig, has lived in Japan for many years and much of the old correspondence and numerous photographs from Wesley and his father that had been stored in Wesley's basement came to our house in Madison for storage.

Fairground, Ontario

We sometimes visited my paternal grandfather's house in Fairground Ontario, but those visits were less frequent than our visits to Delhi. Something I remember from one of those childhood visits is the powerful smell that greeted us when Grandpa was raising hogs. On a later visit I remember seeing Grandpa working on a wooden platform in front of the front door. He had a level with him but the platform was clearly sloping away from the house. Dad noticed this and went over and turned the level around, showing Grandpa that the level was defective. Grandpa was annoyed, and went back to continuing the work as he had been doing it.

Mexico

A few months after we moved to Minnesota my father bought a new two-tone 1950 Nash. That car was to be our means of transportation for family vacations for years to come. One of these, when I was 12, took us all the way to Texas and, for about 1-1/2 hours, across the border into Mexico. That visit was memorable because at a shop in Mexico I bought my first Mexican yoyo. On the way back to the car we met a Mexican kid who saw my yoyo and motioned for me to let him try it. I did, and he showed us how to flip the barrel part around in the air so that handle could be slipped into the hole. Then he showed us how he could flip the barrel off the handle so that it turned completely around and was caught again with the handle in the hole. Once we got home to Minneapolis I practised until I could do the first trick up to 10 times in a row, but I never accomplished the 2nd more difficult trick. Over the years I collected an assortment of these yoyos of different sizes as shown in the photo at left. With all of them I could do the first trick but not the second. (A few photos from that 1952 trip are available here.)

Lake Superior North Shore

During my teen years in Minneapolis my two closest friends were Jeff and Dave. In the fall of 1959 we decided to do a camping trip to Minnesota's north shore of Lake Superior. Jeff's old car got us there well after dark and we made a makeshift camp for the night. The next day we set off to explore the area's rivers and waterfalls. Things went pretty well until we got to the Gooseberry River. That's where I had my accident. Trying to cross the small river by jumping from boulder to boulder, a slippery one caused me to fall and smash my leg on it. I didn't break anything but my leg got pretty swollen. It was dark by the time we were ready to fix supper. My helpful buddies fried up a hamburger for me which seemed pretty soft when I bit into it. A flashlight soon revealed that it was basically raw in the middle. 

Yosemite National Park

A few years later I was camping in Yosemite National Park in California. Foolishly, I had left my backpack, containing a jar of honey, on the site's picnic table when I got in my tent for the night. In the early morning hours I was awakened by noises which turned out to be a bear about to make off with the backpack. I scared it off by banging on a pot, though from its casual departure, it didn't really seem all that frightened.

Point Reyes, California

I was in California again in 2007, this time with my wife Barbara. We were driving our 1994 Toyota. After visiting with sons Robin and Mischa Barb caught a flight from San Jose to Portland Oregon to attend a UUA General Assembly. A few days later I headed up the coast with the car. On the way I visited the historic Point Reyes Lighthouse. This was a significant side trip since the point's land sticks well out into the Pacific Ocean. The lighthouse was built in 1870 and is reached by a long stairway down the hill from the hilltop where cars park. The thing I found most memorable at the site was how the strong onshore winds have shaped the hilltop trees as shown at right. (A detailed account of this whole vacation trip is available here.)

Matanuska Peak Trail, Alaska

The previous summerI had tackled the Matanuska Peak Trail on a visit to Alaska. I did not make it to the peak, but above the 2200 ft level I got to meet a marmot. You can see him here eyeing me from his big rock. (More photos from that trip are posted here.)

Earnslaw Steamer, New Zealand

Finally, here is a memory from my life's longest trip, my trip to New Zealand with Barbara in 2015. We took a trip across Lake Wakatipu in the TSS Earnslaw, a coal fired steamer. At over 100 years old, it is one of the last of its kind. We got to see coal being shoveled into the boiler and read about the ship's history. (Some photos from the New Zealand visit are posted here.)

Many Minneapolis Visits

After my move to Wisconsin in 1961 by far my most common destination for holidary trips has been Minneapolis, a relatively short drive from Madison. After my brother Warren bought a house across the street from Poderhorn Park, I enjoyed 4th of July trips there to take in the fireworks displays put on by the city using the island in Powderhorn Lake. Once I had children Christmas visits provided a wonderful time for his kids and mine to play together, celebtating both Christmas and New Year's Eve. Our family times together from 1982 on in summer and winter are shown in The Minnesota-Wisconsin Connection gallery. A Thanksgiving visit 20 years ago provided the context for one of my poems, Ice Pebbles Dancing.

In 1960 I had a summer job at Dow Chemical Company in Midland Michigan. At the time I was studying chemical engineering as an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota. Dow was running a "Summer Engineer" program for students like me, and as it happened I had a distant relative working for Dow named William Robb Roy Park. He and his wife invited me to stay with them and their children for the summer. At work the father was known as "Bob Park," and he enjoyed confusing coworkers I met by offering to introduce them to "Bob Park."

Dow's goal was to encourage engineering students to come and work for them after graduation. The summer experience had the opposite effect on me. The one thing I remember from the speaker at an orientation session we were required to attend was when he said "profit is not a dirty word." Five years later Dow bid on and won a government contract to make napalm for the military to use in Vietnam. "Profit" at Dow was not only dirty but shameful. I decided that working in the public sector was a higher calling than working in the private sector, and have stayed away from profit motivated employment ever since.

I started graduate school at the University of Wisconsin in 1961, and soon found the campus to be a hotbed of information outside the classroom for anyone concerned about social problems in our society. The more I learned about these problems the more I was inclined to set career goals aimed at working to solve them. The summer of 1964 was Freedom Summer in Mississippi. One of the 3 civil rights workers killed at the beginning of the summer by the KKK, with the assistance of local law enforcement, had been (I learned later) a student at UW-Madison. I took the summer of 1965 off from graduate school to serve as a volunteer for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and interrupted my graduate work again to return to Mississippi in 1967 to teach for a semester at Tougaloo College, a center of civil rights activity.

When I finished grad school in 1970 Ralph Nader was making headlines with his work on consumer protection and environment issues. One of his projects was to organize public interest research groups (PIRGs) on college campuses across the country. His idea was to fund these groups through an addition to student fees, collected when students registered, unless a student took the initiative to decline to pay the fee. An organizing committee for a Wisconsin chapter, WisPIRG, was set up in Madison. About 100 students on the Madison campus got involved in collecting student signatures for a petition to the UW administration asking for this funding scheme. I was hired by the organizing committee as Statewide Coordinator, to be paid if and when the funding scheme was implemented. In that role I visited a number of campuses in the UW system in other parts of the state, where petition drives were also underway. On the Madison campus they collected about 11,000 signatures, but that was less than half of the student body. We met with the Dean of Students anyway, since he had indicated verbally that he would support us, but when we mentioned his verbal assurance he asked "did you get it in writing?" Also invited to the meeting, perhaps by the dean, was the then current editor of the Daily Cardinal student newspaper. She promptly described Nader's funding scheme as "fascist." So our effort failed, and I was never paid except for a small amount to cover my travel expenses.

So what was next? Throughout grad school I had a research assistantship which was funded by a grant from the federal air pollution control agency that existed before the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was formed. Looking for a public sector job in air pollution control was an obvious option. The new EPA had started a program to assist state environmental protection agencies by hiring engineers for a year and assigning them to work for different states. I landed one of these positions and was assigned to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR). Before my year was over the environmental protection folks at the DNR I had decided they wanted to hire me. I had reservations about the DNR, wondering if its bureaucracy would be hard to put up with, but decided to give it a try. My fears were realized when my boss in the air management program submitted a performance evaluation for me rating me as "excellent" in most categories. The response from the DNR personnel staff person, who had never met me, was "does he also walk on water?" My boss brought the feedback to me and apologetically explained that he would need to downgrade his evaluation to make them happy. Never-the-less, I ended up staying in the DNR job until I retired at age 66.

Our air pollution control work at the DNR was mostly aimed at meeting federal requirements, but needed changes in federal law were often delayed by politics. On those rare occasions when there was some consideration of state requirements that went beyond the federal requirements, I was glad to be able to side with those involved in such efforts.

When my boys were little, reading them bedtime stories was my favorite part of our nightly bedtime ritual (topped only by singing a song when requested). A picture book I particularly liked was The Little Engine That Could. I liked to stretch out "I think I can, I think I can" with increasing speed as the engine struggled up the hill. From my own childhood, I don't remember my parents ever reading me bedtime stories during my preschool years. However, when I was old enough to wash the dishes, I remember my father sitting in the kitchen and reading to my siblings and me as we cleaned up after supper. Two of his favorite books were Rabbit Hill by Robert Lawson and Wild Animals I Have Known by Ernest Thompson Seton. When I was old enough to read chapter books on my own, horses were a favorite topic. I think I read everything available before I started high school in Walter Farley's Black Stallion series. I also liked to read nonfiction stories about Native Americans such as one about Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce as he led his tribe in an epic attempt to escape to Canada while being pursued by the U.S. Cavalry.

As an adult, for many years I read very few books that did not contain information I needed for a task at hand. Then, during my retirement years, I took up the practice of joining my wife in reading in bed at night until drowsy. Books for this purpose have almost always been entertaining fiction. Favorite authors have been Canadian science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer and detective story writer Robert B. Parker. I particularly enjoyed Sawyer's neanderthal and WWW trilogies and Parker's Jesse Stone series. My current bedtime book is nonfiction - Freedom Summer by Bruce Watson. It relates to the summer of 1965 that I spent in Mississippi as a volunteer for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

Much has changed during my lifetime on how children hear the news. When I was born in February of 1940 Canada had already sent troops to Europe to fight during the Second World War. During the war years the family lived first in the small farming community of Brownsville Ontario where my father was a country doctor and later in Whitby Ontario while my father took on healthcare responsibilities at a nearby munitions plant. During those years the family's main source of news was probably the newspaper. Newspapers were for grownups, and we children would have heard current news mainly from whatever parents chose to share at the dinner table. News could also be seen and heard at the movie theater where newsreels were commonly shown before the feature film, but I don't recall seeing my first movie before the end of the war. In 1945 we moved to Deep River Ontario, and around that time we acquired a large floor model combination radio and record player, with a drop down record changer for the 78 rpm vinyl records. News then became available from the regular radio network newscasts, but I don't remember my parents making a regular habit of listening to the news. No news of the day that my older siblings or I heard on the radio sticks in my memory.

Our family moved to Minneapolis Minnesota at the end of 1949 and it was during the mid 1950s that my brother James and I got our first radios. Our father picked up a couple of old tube radios with no cases at a Goodwill or similar store for us. I picked the smaller one and spent a good deal of time making a plywood cabinet for it. I sanded it smooth and applied a coat of varnish with a reddish hue. In Minneapolis we had a larger house and James and I had our own bedrooms for the first time. This meant that I could listen to my radio in my bedroom whenever I wished, but I was more interested in music than in news. This was the time when stereo broadcasts first became available. At first it was just stations that broadcast in both AM and FM that experimented with this new idea, airing one channel on AM and the other on FM. I recall that my father did not think much of the idea until he realized, to his surprise, that what came over the two channels was not the same.

My first contact with television was when I was invited to watch a weekly program, probably The Lone Ranger, at a classmate's house within easy walking distance. It became a regular weekly event until the day I showed up only to find they had forgotten about me as they prepared for a family outing. I never went there again. It was not until I was in high school that we got a television set in our own house, a table model in a metal case. Everything on the screen was in black and white of course. My younger siblings and I were not allowed to watch it on school nights, and it was entertainment shows we sought on weekends.

Minneapolis had two daily newspapers back then, and I had a paper route for the afternoon paper one summer. Newspaper headlines provided a ready source of current news. I guess it was the afternoon paper we got at our house. One day my father came to my bedroom to tell me that my stepmother had found something about me in the paper. It turned out to be a letter to the editor from a woman complaining about the behavior of an unnamed employee of the Minneapolis Park Board, and about inadequate facilities at one of three places they operated at Lake Calhoun. The only connection to me was the fact that I had a summer job at a different Park Board facility, at the main beach on Lake Calhoun. I learned later that someone who at times worked with me at the main beach had been the cause of the letter. He had been assigned to work selling food and beverages from the small trailer the Park Board stationed at a smaller beach on the other side of the lake. At that beach they had an outhouse that only lifeguards were allowed to use. The single employee selling things from the trailer was instructed to temporarily close the panel over the sales side of the trailer and pee in a paper cup if he had to go. This was what he was doing when the woman who complained came around to the back door of the trailer and yanked it open. Not surprisingly, his response to the interruption had not been polite.

Speaking of newspapers, for a time I had a job delivering a free weekly paper that was mostly advertising. I pulled the papers around from house to house in a wagon. One day a man walked by me while I was a few steps away from the wagon. I turned back toward him in time to see him surreptitiously sneak a paper out of the wagon. His disgust at seeing what he had stolen was obvious, though he did not seem to notice that I was observing him. I could have called out "you're most welcome sir," but of course I did not. 

All of this was before the internet, which now brings young and old alike a wealth of information, both true and false. Children need well developed critical thinking skills to distinguish between the two. Local news has become harder to get as media outlets have undergone consolidation into the hands of fewer and fewer corporate multimillionaires. Efforts to restore locally controlled local news have included podcasts and low power radio stations like the one that started in our garage, WIDE-LP. I have programmed what that station broadcasts since 2008, making use of podcasts from near and far when broadcast permission has been granted to me via email.

"Things" is a word that can cover anything from the profound to the trivial. It's just physical possessions I'm writing about here. Even the most avid anti-materialist has things of this sort that he or she uses.

The things I have range from the replaceable things I need and use every day to things I rarely use but which are irreplaceable. My son Ian gave me a computer that I use every day. I'm using it now to write this. But one day it will die of old age and not be mourned as it is replaced. Ian also gave me a Trek bicycle that he bought 2nd hand. It is the best bicycle I've ever owned, but with its high pressure tires it has had more flats than all my other bikes combined. I expect it to last longer than me, so I need to decide who to leave it to in my will. In the meantime, it has been replaced with my wife's old bike for my local everyday use. Last year my wife and I had a top of the line heat pump installed with an associated high efficiency gas furnace. It will reduce our household contribution to global warming, but it only has a 10 year guarantee.

On the other hand I have things from our family history that are irreplaceable. Children change most rapidly during their growing years. I have many photographs and tape recordings of our children from those years. Copies have been made of some but not all of them. At the end of Family History in the Trash I mentioned the little red suitcase containing some of these items, conveniently located where it can be grabbed in case of fire. Something from my mother's childhood that I plan to add to that suitcase, when I find where I put it, is a little hand carved brass dinner bell that she brought back from China. She spent most of her early years there, from age 2½ to age 13, with her missionary parents and their growing family.

Born in Canada, I guess I have always liked snow, and that's the Canadian spelling of colors in the title. In winter my favorite color is white, the white of fresh snow and of hoarfrost. As spring arrives I am cheered by the reemergence of green as the new leaves sprout from buds and push out of the ground, but the green soon becomes a backdrop for the brighter contrasting colors of flowers in many hues. Summer brings the colors of late blooming flowers, blue skies and puffy white clouds on long sunny days, and sometimes a spectacular sunset in shades of orange. In autumn the chlorophyll in the leaves of trees breaks down to reveal the underlying orange, yellow or red fall color characteristic of each species. The maple trees with the brightest red leaves are my favorites. When I was a boy in Ontario we had no officially adopted flag of Canada. It was not until I was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin years later that Canada adopted its national flag with a red maple leaf in the center.

In January 2024 I participated in a panel presentation at Prairie Unitarian Universalist Society on "Answering the Call for Civil Rights," an audio recording of which is available here. The order of service for the Sunday program, available here, shows that a song I had suggested, Pete Seeger's "Those Three Are On My Mind," was sung as the prelude by my wife and another member of the congregation. The song is about the 3 young civil rights workers who were murdered in Mississippi by the KKK and local law enforcement at the beginning of the 1964 Freedom Summer Project. In connection with the program I had checked out a book from the library titled Freedom Summer: The Savage Season of 1964 That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy by Bruce Watson which I subsequently read. Published in 2010, the book brought back memories of people I had met and filled in many details about the murders of the 3, two white and one black, I had not known. It also described murders in Mississippi of others who stood up for the rights of black people, murders that never made national news because the victims were black. The book concluded with a description of the substantial progress that has been made in race relations in Mississippi over the years since that summer. A highway has been named in honor of the 3, and the state marker shown at right has been installed at the site of their murder.

My time in Mississippi began the in 1965, the year after Freedom Summer. I interrupted by graduate work at the University of Wisconsin to go to Mississippi as a summer volunteer for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic. Soon after arriving I opened a small account in a black owned savings and loan association in Jackson, so that I would have a safe location for a little spending money. That proved to be fortunate. Three days after arriving I joined more than 400 others in a march on the capitol. It is hard to imagine a more peaceful march. We stayed on sidewalks, stopping for traffic lights at intersections to let the cars pass by. Nevertheless, we were halted by police. I remember the long line of marchers, mostly black, along the sidewalk as the police announced over a megaphone that anyone who did not want to be arrested should step out of line. I did not see anyone who did. The police brought up a series of trucks, loaded us in, and took us to the state fairgrounds a few minutes away. With the other male prisoners I was held in the round topped fairgrounds exhibition hall shown at right for 10 days on the charge of parading without a permit. I have described the violence by police, who had their badge numbers taped over to prevent identification, in the letter I wrote at the time, posted here. What follows are primarily memories I have not previously written about.

The belongings of volunteers from other states were held at the Delta Ministry Mount Beulah center while we were imprisoned. When we got out it was immediately clear that security there had been loose. Hangers on around the movement had gone through our things and stolen whatever they found of value. One girl was distraught to find that $200 cash she had brought for bail money was gone. I believe she soon returned to the north. I inquired about a small portable radio of mine that was gone. A local black man heard me, and the radio miraculously appeared. I took the radio out of its leather case and found that a bill I had folded and placed in the bottom of the case was still there. Seeing the money, the young man immediately started talking about how he had rent to pay, looking for a handout. A Freedom Democratic Party leader who was there intervened, sending the hanger-on away.

I spent a night or two in a "shotgun" building used by project organizers, in a sleeping bag on the floor. The name for this kind of building came from its shape - two front entrances with a series of rooms straight back from the entrances without connection across the center wall. While there I was awakened after midnight by a series of phone calls clearly intended as harassment. The office was not open and no one else was there. Hanging up did no good because they just called back. Finally I stayed on the line and asked the caller if he and his buddies were enjoying their beer. Apparently they were. After that either they were tired of their game or I took the phone off the hook, I don't recall which, and I got to sleep the rest of the night. While staying at that location I left my things there during the day. These included a research notebook and notes I had brought with me, in case I had time to work on getting the notes entered into the notebook. On arriving back for the night I found these were gone. Fortunately I found them is the trash can. A well-meaning volunteer had found them and thrown them out, not realizing what they were or who they belonged to.

During the day I canvassed for a Freedom School that was being started in the Jackson neighborhood. I was called "Mr. COFO man" because the previous summer had seen volunteer work there by the Council of Federated Organizations, one of the groups mentioned in Bruce Watson's book. I will never forget one small white haired black woman who I told about the Freedom School. Looking up at my white face, which she must have associated with the ruling class that she had lived under her entire life, she ask "Do I have to go?" Shocked, I responded "of course not," to her relief. Another memory from that time is the young girl who liked to show off for her friends (and anyone else) how she could pry the cap off a Coke bottle with her teeth.

We out-of-state volunteers were included in some mass meeting with local black activists. Some of the more radical activists thought white volunteers should not have been invited to the state, while others expressed the view that black and white together, “like salt and pepper,” was the way it ought to be.

There was some social time with other volunteers. One white volunteer had brought his trumpet with him, and I got to go with a racially mixed group when he was sitting in with black musicians at a black night club in the Jackson area. It was late at night and I was having trouble staying awake. At one point, as I was dozing off, I was awakened by a hard squeeze on my knee. White police officers had come into the night club to check things over. Apparently if I was asleep it might have given them an excuse to arrest someone.

There was also at least one occasion with some dancing. That may have been the evening when I was in a car full of black girls one of whom was holding a fussing baby. They decided to hand the baby to me and the baby quieted down. The girls all said um-hmm, deciding that the experiment proved something, I'm not sure what. Maybe the baby was used to being held by a white father.

For a short time I was housed with a couple of other volunteers in a middle class black home where they had set up cots in their dining room. Ready to serve us breakfast, our hostess knocked on the dining room door to ask if we were up. Just awakened, a young white male volunteer who had slept in nothing but undershorts sat up and said "yes." Our hostess came in and was not pleased with what she saw.

This may have been the neighborhood in which I was walking with a young black man at twilight when a pickup truck pulled up next to us. Out the open window the white driver snarled "nigger lover" at me before driving off. My black companion was much more upset by the incident than I was.

Later I was the sole volunteer housed for an extended time with a black family in a poorer section of town. I had a comfortable couch to sleep on and a bathtub to bathe in. I remember there was no hot water, but with the hot Mississippi temperatures the bath water was not that cold. The family had a teenage daughter who joined a picket line at a local grocery store calling for black workers to be hired. I heard from another volunteer that the picketers had been arrested by the police. When I returned to the house I asked the mother if she had heard about her daughter. Her reaction was one of panic. I hastened to assure her that her daughter was ok, she had only been arrested. My snapshots from the summer include one of picketers. On my last night with the family they insisted that I sleep in a bed that had just been vacated by a grandmother. The bed was in a room where the floor was sloping rather steeply, making the bed slope strongly as well. It was my least comfortable night.

I spent some of my time outside the Jackson area. One Sunday I attended a small rural church service in a community meeting room where I believe I was the only white person. During his talk the preacher made note of my presence as a civil rights worker and asked if I had anything to say. I said no, thank you. He was clearly pleased at my polite response, and probably not displeased that I was not going to horn in on his pulpit time. After his sermon the collection plate was sent around, that apparently being how the preacher was paid. Seeing that an unsatisfactory amount had been collected, the minister sent the collection plate around again. Then after the service he departed in a large chauffeur-driven car.

In August, on the day I was to board the train to return to my neglected graduate school work in Madison, I was with a middle aged black woman who expressed surprise that I was leaving then. She may have been a Freedom Democratic Party candidate for office. I asked "do you want me to stay?" but got no request for a last minute change in plans. On the still segregated train I settled in the section occupied by black passengers. A black conductor suggested I might be more comfortable in the white section but I declined to move. He did not insist, and the other passengers in my section seemed glad to have me.

Back in Madison, with my Mississippi memories still fresh, I found my fondest memories were yet to come. I soon met, recently arrived in Madison from Mississippi, the girl with the golden smile. A top graduate from Rust College, she was at UW-Madison to get her master's degree. When I learned that she was from Mississippi, the Mississippi connection was enough to overcome my usual shyness. Her smile was quite literally golden because her two upper incisors were gold. I think that made her shy about smiling. Of mixed black, Indian and white heritage, she described herself as “yaller,” imitating the southern dialect with which she did not speak.

It turned out that we lived right across the street from each other. She had a first floor front apartment in a large apartment building facing the old house where I had a 2nd floor front bedroom. We could see when our lights came on in the evening, and once we got to know each other, she would sometimes come over when she saw my light on. We were only a block off of State Street, the main drag between the campus and the state Capitol. One of the things we enjoyed doing together was walking down the State Street sidewalk noticing people who seemed to be noticing us in an uncomfortable way as they approached. After they passed us if we could turn around suddenly and catch them staring back at us, we thought that was pretty funny. A memorable date we had was when she joined me for supper at the Green Lantern Eating Coop on University Avenue. The Green Lantern was a gathering place for social activists and radicals for all sorts. For the occasion my date wore a striking hairpiece that hung well down her back. She even came to Minneapolis with me once and met my parents, though a girl I knew from Minneapolis came with us. We weren't sure how my father, and especially my stepmother, would react if we appeared as an interracial couple.

When she finished her Master's degree and I saw her off at the bus station, about to head back to Mississippi, I could see through the bus window that she was wiping away tears. Then, a few months later, I got a Christmas card with a note about how much she missed me. I did see her once again when I had a one semester appointment in 1967 as an assistant professor of mathematics at Tougaloo College, which is in the Jackson suburban area. We went to a play together at the college. But the last time I saw her she made me promise not to contact her again. Perhaps the fact that she had crossed the color line while up north was not something she wanted to share with her family or friends.

I kept my promise, but I had not promised to forget the time we had together. She had (and has) an unusual first name which, out of respect for her privacy, you will not find anywhere in this little story. My curiosity has led me to occasional internet searches for her name. I have learned that she went on to Rutgers for her doctorate, that she married a handsome African who also has a doctorate, that they both got faculty positions at Jackson State College (now Jackson State University) where her faculty photo showed her gold teeth had been replaced with white ones, that they have a daughter who got married, and that they have a son who was just this year chosen as the Distinguished Alumni for 2024 for the Mississippi State University Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. I also learned that she was, for a time, advisor to the student radio station at Rust College in Holly Springs Mississippi. I emailed the station once about a program they were airing, thinking it might be something I could use on our low power station in Madison. I never got a response from the station, but ever since then I have been on the email list of the NAACP organization for the state of Mississippi. They probably have no idea that I am 700 miles away.

Tougaloo College is a small historically black private college near Jackson. You can see some photos from my time there here. I have mixed feeling about my experience teaching there. I knew about the college through their chaplain, Rev. Edwin King, who is mentioned in Bruce Watson's book. I was glad to be associated with a college with a history of involvement in the civil rights movement. When I arrived for my job the college president told me with some pride that the KKK had burned a cross on their lawn. The president and most of the students were black but most of the faculty members were white. (I only noticed one white student.) Sometimes students could be heard singing freedom songs on campus.

Students had to pass a Mathematics requirement to graduate. Most of the students in my classes were there only because of that requirement. Never having taught before, I had to spend long hours in class preparation, leaving little time for anything else. Despite this, I felt exhilarated at being out on my own, making a living for the first time on a new campus, far away from student roots.

I had driven down to Mississippi in my used 1958 Chevrolet. Under Mississippi law I had to get a Mississippi license plates, even though I was only going to be working there for one semester. Mississippi plates include the county of registration. Tougaloo happens to be in Madison County, which is why that name appears on the plate shown at right. The job came with a faculty apartment on campus, and I had little use for the car once I was there. I drove into Jackson once for a haircut. Haircuts were $1 at a barber shop where the large front windows had been replaced with plywood. (That proved to be my last visit to a barber shop. Ever since then I have cut my own hair.) Tougaloo students who were doing civil rights organizing in surrounding rural areas asked to borrow the car, and that's the main use it got while I was at the college.

As a private college, I guess Tougaloo was enrolling a relatively privileged student body. I posted hours when I was available to provide one-on-one help to students who were struggling with math, but not a single student ever came in, even though toward the end of the semester it was apparent that a number were failing. It was evident that some students were not making any serious effort to learn the material. Another math teacher, a retirement age white woman from the north, actually had her whole class reciting things aloud together, which I found to be a disturbing example of white paternalism. At one point I was asked to take over her calculus class while she was out sick. After explaining something in that class I asked if there were any questions. They asked me to go over what I had just explained again, and I did so. Later one of the students came around to ask if I could take over the class from their regular teacher, since I explained things. I could not, and she soon returned.

A couple of years later, when I finally reached the end of writing up my doctoral dissertation and was nearing graduation from the UW-Madison, I contacted Tougaloo again. I learned that they were no longer interested in hiring me. It turned out that a girl in one of my classes had complained to the college president, claiming I had told her that I would give her a failing grade no matter how well she did on the final exam. I had never said that to any student, so of course her statement was a lie. I may have told her how well she had to score on the final to bring her semester average up to a passing grade. At any rate, I decided that I was not outgoing enough to be a good teacher at the college level, and chose a different career path.

I thought of subtitling this piece "Tales of Trauma and Humiliation," but fear not dear reader, there will be some pleasant memories from my days in kindergarten through high school as well.

I attended 5 different public schools in two countries, beginning with kindergarten in Whitby Ontario. It was the fall of 1945. World War II was drawing to a close and my father was finishing up his job at a nearby shell filling plant that had been supplying shells for Canada's war effort in Europe. My father duly documented the occasion as I was about to set out from home to my first day of classes as shown at right. At recess time on a later day, too shy to make friends, I was sitting on the ground by myself surrounded by fall leaves. A man approaching the door into the school was about to walk right by me. In a playful, attention getting gesture I tossed a bunch of leaves into the air just as he neared, not noticing until too late the angry scowl on his face as he stared straight ahead. It was the principal, and he immediately hauled me into his office to be disciplined for the offense of throwing leaves at the principal. My mind is blank about what happened in that office. It may have involved a leather strap applied across the hands of misbehaving pupils. Being hauled into the office was traumatic enough.

For the next 3 days I moped around, barely speaking to anyone. It was my older brother, who likely knew about this principal by reputation if not by personal experience, who guessed what was wrong. He must have told our parents. Many years later my older sister wrote about how, unbeknownst to me, after learning about the incident my mother paid an angry visit to the principal to confront him concerning his traumatizing behavior.

Half way through that first school year the family moved to Deep River Ontario. There I was confronted with the first big decision of my young life. There was no kindergarten yet available in the town, newly constructed for the workers at Canada's first nuclear reactor. My mother asked me whether I wanted to wait until the following fall to enter first grade, or start attending the second half of first grade right away. I could not imagine what I would do all day if I was not in school, so for better or for worse I picked the second option. I think it was for worse. My mother had taught school before marrying my father, but the idea of her teaching me kindergarten until summer arrived was never mentioned. I guess the reason was because she was pregnant with my youngest brother Warren, who arrived that spring in April.

One day I was in the nurse's office having my temperature taken. As usual for the time, she was using a small glass thermometer with a bulb of mercury at the end. She let go of it before it was securely in my mouth. I intercepted the falling thermometer with my foot, a natural thing for me to do. The nurse was very relieved that the thermometer had not hit the floor and broken. Another time I got into some minor squabble with a pair of twins in the washroom at the school. The 3 of us were sent to the principal's office for a lecture which didn't amount to much, but the principal concluded by turning to me and saying ominously "still waters run deep." On another occasion I was guilty of some behavior that resulted in the teacher sending me to the cloakroom, which was a partitioned area at the back of the classroom. As the class continued she apparently forgot about me. In my pocket I had a prized possession, a jack knife which had been given to me, perhaps as a class gift. Eventually another student approached the cloakroom. Employing a very foolish attention getting plan, I opened the knife and held it high in a statue-like pose with my eyes crossed. The student immediately ran and told the teacher "He has a knife!" I guess I had some lame response like "He knew I was kidding." I think the class was over by then.

It was a stressful time as I tried to catch up with the other students. We had notebooks with the multiplication tables on the back cover. It seemed the others knew multiplication up to 12 times 12 which was all new to me. Both teachers and parents seemed to place importance on homework, and I took my homework assignments very seriously. As a result I was stunned one Thursday when my father came home and announced that he was taking the family to see a movie. Why would he do that on a school night? I had not done my homework for the next day. Upset, I said I couldn't go to the movie with an undone homework assignment. No one else seemed to have any such conflict. They decided to go to the movie without me. I had never been left home alone like that before. I cried the whole time they were gone, and told my mother that when they got back. She reported that to my father, who seemed disgusted with the whole affair.

I was half way through 5th grade when the family moved again, this time to a new country where they had states instead of provinces. We arrived in the state of Minnesota on the last day of 1949. In addition to moving to a new country I was also moving from a small town to my first big city, Minneapolis. In Deep River we had a live-in housekeeper who knew something about schools in the U.S. She had told us that we could expect our classes to be covering things we'd already had in Canada. My 5th grade experience at Douglas Elementary School largely confirmed that, though I was behind in practicing handwriting. In fact, at the end of the school year I and several other kids had to come in on another day to work on things we had failed to finish on time. In my case, I had several pages of handwriting practice to do. However, the teacher was not serious about making us do everything that was overdue. After about an hour she had had enough and let us all go.

Another memory from grade school came on our first spring in Minneapolis. My brother and James and I had short pants that we would have worn to school in Canada when the temperature warmed up in the spring but we knew our classmates would all be wearing long pants. Our mother wanted us to start wearing our short pants. We put up a terrible fuss. I was afraid we would be teased mercilessly. In the end our mother insisted that we wear the short pants for just one day, to see if it was as bad as we thought. As it turned out, I only got one comment that one day. As we waited outside for classes to start another student asked "Did your mother make you wear those?" I allowed as how she did. No one else said anything that day, and we got to dress like the other kids after that.

The fellow student who was most friendly to me at Douglas School was Dennis McCue. In Canada I had always been "Robert" to everyone, but Dennis introduced me to the American custom of calling people with that name "Bob." Outside the family, that nickname has stuck with me ever since. I believe it was at Douglas School that I got my first few piano lessons. I learned a couple of simple songs but never pursued that instrument in later years. The school was within easy walking distance of our house, but the building was old and dingy. Some of us kids liked to sing "Douglas School is falling down" to the tune of "London Bridge is Falling Down." Some years after my brother Warren, 6 years younger than me, attended the school, it was torn down.

A final grade school memory comes from the playground adjacent to the school. There was no grass, just a flat expanse that must have been asphalt beneath the cinders or dirt. I guess I was delayed in leaving school on this day because there was no one on the playground, as I came out of the school, except a girl and a boy. The girl had somehow lost one shoe and the boy was tormenting her. He had apparently thrown the shoe off a short distance and was preventing her from getting to it. I strode up to the boy and was surprised to find that he was totally intimidated by me. I ordered him to get the shoe and return it to the girl, which he immediately did. The girl put on the shoe and thanked me, and we 3 went our separate ways.

My next school was Jefferson Junior High School. It was farther away, about a mile from our house, and still stands today. As with all my public schools, there were no school buses to ride. It was up to me to get to school on my own by walking or biking. At Jefferson I decided to take band as one of my classes, and picked cornet as my instrument. However, that was not to be. I brought the assigned school cornet home and foolishly set it on the kitchen table, standing on its bell. Someone, probably one of my brothers, knocked it over and broke off the tube holding the mouthpiece. (If I recall correctly, that part of the tubing looked like it had been broken once before.) At the school they told me that was their last cornet. I had to choose a different instrument. I had heard a girl a year ahead of me demonstrate the French horn on stage and I liked its pure, mellow sound, so I agreed to take that up as my instrument. My assigned French horn (in its case) began to make regular trips home with me for practice. The photo at left shows me holding the somewhat battered French horn in our driveway in 1952.

Some of the kids at Jefferson were budding juvenile delinquents. I remember one student boasting about getting into a knife fight. I biked to school whenever weather permitted, and I think I was using my older brother's bike from Canada. It was a single gear model with coaster brakes, operated by pedaling backwards. That made it easier to bike with one hand on the handlebars and one holding the French horn. One day I was about to mount the bike and head home when a roughneck student grabbed the bike, held it over his head, and threw it on the ground, showing off for his nearby buddies. Then he demanded to know if I was going to report him, perhaps looking for an excuse to start a fight. Finding the bike not seriously damaged, I simply picked it up and went on my way.

I think playing in the band was the most positive experience I had at Jefferson. Ninth grade was my last year at the school, and by then the band I played in did not sound too bad. The family came to our spring concert, which was recorded. We got a souvenir copy of the concert on a green transparent plastic disk the size of the 33-1/3 vinyl records in our record collection to which it was added. We must have listened to it at least once on our floor model radio/record player in the front living room. However, after my mother's death in January 1955 and my father's remarriage that fall, the living room was made off limits for us kids. When I looked for the green record later it had disappeared, never to be seen again.

For 10th through 12th grades it was on to West High School (right), which was located a bit farther south. I was doing better academically by then, and got mostly As with two major exceptions, typing and biology. Our typing grade was based on speed and number of errors. I sat in the back row in that class and was not paying attention when I heard the teacher saying not to worry about errors as we were about to start the next typing test. I asked the girl across from me if the teacher had said he would not count the errors this time. She did not know, but we both proceeded as if speed was the only thing the test would be graded on. It was a big mistake. The teacher later commented to the class about two of us going crazy in the error department. After that disaster I did a bunch of extra credit typing to try to bring my grade up, to no avail. I was given a C. That was also the grade I was given in biology after turning the semester's big project in later than my classmates. The teacher may have forgotten the deadline date he had given us weeks before. I think I got my project in on the last day, and the teacher later conceded that it had not been late, but I was not assertive enough to ask if that meant my grade could be changed. I had a frog project for that same class which involved dissolving the frog and then mounting and labeling the bones. At the time my older sister and her husband were staying with us while he pursued a doctorate in entomology at the University of Minnesota. That gave me access to one of his books which had all the proper names for the frog bones. I turned in my project using those names, and the teacher asked if he could keep the card with labeled bones as an example to future students of how the project should be done.

Music was again important to me in high school. I continued playing the French horn and taking the school instrument home for practice. The girl who had introduced me to the sound of the instrument before I took it up at Jefferson was first chair in the horn section in the West High band. By my junior year I was good enough to challenge her for the position. Our teacher listened to each of us play during the challenge and named me as the new first chair player. I was also asked to play in a little German Club band that our German teacher put together. In place of "lederhosen" we wore bermuda shorts. He had us play a few gigs outside the school.

At West High sports became part of my school experience for the first time. I considered trying out for the hockey team, but was quickly discouraged by a serious candidate for the team who asked how fast I could skate backwards. I looked into joining the cross country ski team, but was told all the available skis had been taken. Since I was skinny and younger than my classmates, my father told me he would not sign the permission slip for me to play football. That was fine with me. I had no interest in playing football. In the end, the teams that I joined were the track and cross country teams, starting with track the spring of my junior year. I became a half miler. (The half mile was also known as the 550 yard sprint). In two years on the track team I never finished a race in first place, but there was one time when I was the first to finish my leg of a relay. It was not because I was the fastest runner, but because the runner in the lead dropped his baton. The runner right behind him had to stop to avoid running into him as he reached down to pick up the baton. I was running 3rd a bit farther back, and was able to swerve to the side and run around them. This all happened behind the stands on one side of the field while watchers were all on the other side of the field, so it came as quite a surprise then I spurted out from behind the stands in the lead, came around the bend, and reached the handoff point before runners from the other school's teams could catch up. As I recall, the West High team was no longer in the lead by the end of the relay.

It must have been my senior year when I was in the 4 mile relay event at the city meet which West won. Finishing first meant each of us 4 runners got a little medal the size of a penny. As a half miler I was expecting to run in the 2 mile relay, but at the meet one of our best runners learned that a school which was a top compeditor was "loading" the 2 mile relay with its fastest runners. That led to us switching 3 of our top runners to the 4 mile relay, plus me. I was the slowest leg, running the mile in over 5 minutes while the other 3 were all under that, but the combination was good enough for the win.

I was only on the cross country team for one year, joining in the fall of 1956 as a 16 year old senior. Our practice course was a few blocks from the school along the shore of Lake of the Isles. The course was 2.6 miles long, and sometimes served as the race course in meets with other schools. Once toward the end of the season our coach had us run the course twice without stopping. Because of the shape of the lake there was a place on the far side of the lake, where the coach could not see us, where runners could take a shortcut. During that long practice some students took the shortcut, but I ran the full 5.2 miles. I was in better shape than ever before in my life. This was the most successful team our school had during my 3 years of high school, winning the city championship and finishing 2nd in the state meet. The photo at right shows the top 7 runners on the team with me on the right - the slowest of the group, not too bad on a team of 28 runners. The top 5 runners were all seniors, followed by one junior and me. In the state meet each team could only enter 5 runners. I attended the state meet as an alternate, which meant I did not run since the top 5 seniors were all healthy. Those top 5 runners would also have prevented me from earning a letter in the sport except for one meet with a school which we knew we could beat, in which the coach gave those 5 runners the day off. The school had one good runner who won the race, followed not far behind by the junior and me. After the race that school's top runner commented to us that "I thought Hafner was going to catch me," thinking he had beaten our team captain and fastest runner. But it was the junior, with light colored hair like our captain, that he had beaten. He was incredulous upon hearing that we had not run our top 5 runners. Our school colors were green and white, and if you earned a letter you got a large green letter suitable for sewing on your letter sweater, if you bought one. I never got such a sweater, but I think I still have my large green letter somewhere. At the end of the season there was a banquet for team members and parents which my father attended. They showed some movie clips of us running in meets with other schools. My father saw me running by with long strides and commented later that I could do better if I kept my long strides but made my legs go faster! (Why didn't I think of that?)

There was some real comradery among members of that winning cross country team, but looking back at the names of those on the team there is only one student that I got to know very well, Umberto Neri. He was an exchange student from Italy. In my yearbook he wrote "Bob Fella, best of luck to one of the nicest guys I ever met, and a good friend, student and athlete." That senior year I also met West High's other exchange student, Sajaini Mahtani from Pakistan. I had not planned to go to the senior prom, but I was approached one day in homeroom by a girl who had been an exchange student from West High to Greece. She seemed to feel strongly that someone should ask Sajaini to the senior prom, and pressed me to be that person. With considerable apprehension, I agreed. I went through the process of getting her a corsage, picking her up (my Dad must have driven) and taking her to the dance. She was a skilled dancer, having performed a Pakistani dance on stage at West, but that did not help with my unskilled social dancing. I remember sitting at a table with her at the prom, a wonderful opportunity to ask her questions about her home and her experience coming to America, but I totally blew it. Awkwardly, I asked her if she would like to go and find someone for us to talk to. She declined the idea, preferring to let them come to us, which they did not. On a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being a total failure and 10 being a great success, I would rate our evening a 1. I never had another occasion to talk to her. Never-the-less she wrote a polite note in my yearbook saying "Dear Bob, it was lots of fun knowing you and going with you to the prom. All the luck for your future studies and luck with your athletics."

My 1957 yearbook is full of upbeat notes, mostly from long forgotten classmates. Among the much smaller number of notes in my 1955 yearbook is one from Dennis McCue, who wrote "Dear Bob. I have known you since 5th grade at Douglas school, when you first came to this country. During that time you have been a very good friend." Later, after he had learned to drive, I read in the newspaper that he had been hospitalized after a serious accident involving a bus. My parents were quick to assume that he, a teenage driver, had been at fault, but I pointed out that the story said that the bus driver had been ticketed for causing the accident.

My years at West only resulted in one lasting friendship, with Dave Mitchell (mentioned in the story titled Vacation Memories). Unlike me he was interested in football. He got on to West High's team as 2nd string quarterback. The result was that he did not get onto the playing field at all until the last quarter of the last game of his senior year, when the coach put him in for one play and then took him out again. I was probably at that game as a member of the marching band, which provided a little music at some of the games. Dave played the clarinet in the band, but of course he could not be in the game band when he was suited up to play football. The West High football team was characterized by not being very competitive against the teams from the area's larger high schools. In one notable season, they failed to score a single point all season, but they tied one game, 0 to 0. That was against the bottom dwelling team from Vocational High School. That school did not even have its own football field. The field at West was a bit cramped. At one end if anyone kicked a field goal, the football flew over the fence and into the street beyond. West High was closed in 1982. All that remains there now is a plaque in its memory. I expect Dave and I commiserated over our lack of high school girl friends. I knew his phone number by heart and visited his home. His father liked to refer to small black children as pickaninnies, which Dave and I both found offensive. I only recall there being one black student at our high school. Dave went out of his way to engage in friendly conversation with him.

In the area of social life (or lack thereof) I could describe a number of other missed opportunities, embarrassments and failures during my time in high school, but let me add just one more. I was sitting in chemistry waiting for class to start one day when I happened to hear behind me a conversation about a student who had his hair cut by a parent who placed a bowl on his head. This triggered a painful memory from years before. I think someone during my grade school years in Canada had said my hair looked like it was cut that way. Not looking around in class I said too loud "with a bowl!" The look I got from a classmate who could see behind told me I had put my foot in my mouth - a student behind me had the haircut in question. I quickly added in a softer voice "well my father cuts my hair too, but not with a bowl." After class in the hallway the student who had been the victim of my outburst said to me, in a friendly voice, "we could start a new hairstyle" in the school. I was too embarrassed to respond.

As graduation day approached, one pending final humiliation had me worried. The graduating class was to sit on the stage in the high school auditorium as those getting special awards were honored. The honors group would sit in front with the rest of us behind. Of course my two Cs meant I would not be in the honors group, but I had been named recipient of the Bausch and Lomb Honorary Science Award, which meant I would be called forward from the masses to receive it, or so I expected. I thought it would be embarrassing for my parents and others to see that, but it turned out that my stepmother and father had made plans for a vacation trip that would take them out of town on graduation day. Once I provided them with the official announcement of the graduation ceremony my father indicated that they didn't wish to change their vacation plans. (No doubt he would have been willing, but any such change would have been a major annoyance to my stepmother.) Then when graduation day actually arrived, the science award was given to someone else, and to my relief, there was no need for me to come forward. The selection for the science award was based on the cumulative test scores posted by our chemistry teacher. He had informed me that I would get the award because I had the top score in his classes for the first semester. However, the school principal did not know this, and he evidently visited the chemistry classroom late in the second semester and saw that a girl had edged me out as the top scorer by then. At the graduation ceremony he surprised the girl by telling her that she was getting the award. This was much to the annoyance of our chemistry teacher, who had not been consulted. He told me later that I would still get the award, and that the school was starting the practice that year of giving two of the annual awards, one to a boy and one to a girl.

Though he did not come to my graduation, my father did buy me a graduation present, a leather briefcase with my initials on it.

As a young person in the USA with my first radio, I let the rock & roll bandwagon roll on by. The heavy drums in what I think of as bang bang music never appealed to me. I can appreciate the dramatic range possible with a full orchestra performing works such as Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite, but my preference is for softer, simpler songs as found, for example, in folk music with just voice and guitar. That does not mean I look for simple melodies. The best melodies can surprise you at every turn while still leaving you with the sense that the melody knows just where it is going.

Since 2008, first unofficially and then officially, I have been Program Director for a low power radio station in Madison WI. For more than a decade I have been choosing the type of music the station broadcasts. Not wanting to compete with area full power stations broadcasting music in the classical, pop, country and  classical rock genres, I posted the slogan "Music off the beaten track" on our station website. I feel there is a lot of good music out there that does not get much air time. On our station's weekly schedule I have color coded the numerous genres we air. The best known artists in those genres are included in what we air, but in building up the station music library over the years I have discovered many outstanding artists and groups I had not heard of before. A few examples are listed below, each linked to its Wikipedia page (if available), followed by a song that is a favorite of mine.

The God-talk that surrounds us in American society is a glossy cover for a book of life whose content bears little relation to the cover. Such talk is a distraction from a clear understanding of both the goodness in people and the fundamental social problems we need to be addressing. In my view, we have but one life to live and one planet on which to live it. My engagement in promoting free interchange of ideas unrestricted by any religious mindset and working with others to solve social problems is what gives my life meaning.

As a humanist, it seems to me that throughout history humans have created gods to explain things they didn't understand. These explanations have filled a need for a particular social grouping and a particular time. But others have followed with elaborations and scholarly treatises that have given the gods a life of their own within each society, and social pressure has followed toward acceptance by all of what the scholars have written. This pressure is exerted most strongly through family and through the religious institutions that have developed in each society.

An example of family pressure brought to bear on me came when I wrote my father, during my college student days, that I had been elected president of the campus group for Unitarian students. His response was as follows:

"I must say I am deeply disturbed that you have decided to be satisfied with the shallow humanist faith of unitarianism. I had hoped that you would think and pray your way through to a dynamic faith ... which calls forth the courage to venture and live by faith in spite of doubts. ... Love of God is the foundation of faith. This love of God becomes so deep and genuine that God himself becomes one's ultimate concern."

This illustrates how important one's god concept can be to a person, and I am not hostile to such concepts, but as a result of my personal growth they have simply ceased to carry any meaning for me. Goodness is something we come to understand from our experience in interacting with our fellow human beings, and for those who look to holy scriptures or god concepts for guidance, these sources of guidance need to be informed by that human experience. Religion fails when that does not happen.

The elders in my life were my parents, my grandparents, and uncles and aunts. Let's start with parents.

Parents

After my father died in Arizona in 1985, my sister Betty wrote some recollections of him during the first 10 years of her life which were read at the memorial service for him held at the big Methodist church in Minneapolis to which he had belonged. Those recollections, available here, conclude with the lines "But then the war came and I grew older. All of our lives changed then and there was never time again." I was the war baby who arrived in February of 1940, when Canada was already involved in the war in Europe. When I was old enough to ask my father about his past, there never seemed to be time. When he retired at age 70 he and my stepmother moved to Arizona. It was not until they visited Minneapolis in 1984 that my brother Warren and I had an opportunity to ply him with questions. We recorded that conversation while our stepmother waited impatiently in the nearby kitchen. Dad was quite hard of hearing by then, and as the photo at right shows he had headphones on so that he could hear our questions, spoken into a microphone. The recording is available here.

As described in The Forgotten Birthday and Family History in the Trash, my mother died of cancer when I was 14 and my father married my stepmother Evelyn less than a year later. The first time Evelyn set foot in the kitchen while I was there I muttered something she could not hear and she immediately said loudly to my father "Robert says I'm crazy." Of course I denied this, having said no such thing, but things never improved much from there. Though my older brother Douglas never had to live with her, he had his own conflict with her. He paid us a surprise visit, letting himself in with his front door key as always and calling out "hello" to the household. Such offensive behavior was totally unacceptable to Evelyn. She immediately sent our father to recover that front door key from him. After that he came to my bedroom, sprawled on the bed and commented, with tears in his eyes, on how things had changed.  My mother had been his stepmother through most of his growing years, but as Doug says in his memoir, after his mother died "there were a number of housekeepers to take care of and watch over Betty and [me] until a remarkable lady, Catherine Leonard Park, became the mother I really knew. I say remarkable because this woman had never been married and had to step into another woman's shoes in another woman's house where a family of two rambunctious children were busy declaring their independence."

My sister Betty and her first husband were living in Minneapolis when their first child was born. After my mother died and for a time after Evelyn moved into the house on Humboldt Avenue the three of them resided on the 3rd floor of that house in what had originally been servant's quarters. One evening Betty and her husband were going out and needed a baby sister after their original plans for a sitter did not pan out. At the last minute they tried to persuade me to take on that role, though I had no previous experience with things like changing diapers. Evelyn was outraged that they would presume to make such baby sitting arrangements in her house without her permission. I don't recall what alternate arrangements were made, but no baby sitting occurred in that house. On another occasion when Betty but not her husband were with us at supper time, Evelyn was doling out slices of pie of the size she deemed appropriate.  Betty made the mistake of commenting that she had lost weight since moving into the house. Much offended, Evelyn plopped an extra large piece of pie on Betty's plate and stalked out of the room. Hearing Betty's husband talk about such incidents, I got the impression that he found gleeful pleasure in the stories he had to tell friends about his mother-in-law.

After I came to Madison in 1961 to start graduate school my father sold the large house on Humboldt Ave. that we had lived in since moving to Minneapolis in 1950. He and my two younger brothers moved to a smaller house near the Mississippi River with our stepmother. On a holiday visit to the new house I found myself alone with my father in the basement where we had a chance to talk. However, after a few minutes our conversation was cut short by my stepmother, who called down the basement stairs "What are you doing down there, Wilford?" My impression was that she was worried that we might be talking about her. There was a couch in that basement on which I got to spend the night once or twice on visits, but Evelyn was not happy with that. The kitchen was at the top of the stairs to the basement, and on one occasion she loudly banged metal pots around, evidently to make sure I did not sleep in. The noise was rather comical, really. After that she informed me that I would be more comfortable staying with friends when I visited Minneapolis. I identified with the way Douglas and Betty related to Evelyn, and followed their lead in addressing a Christmas present I bought for her to "Evelyn." This was unacceptable! The present was returned to me unopened. Evelyn informed me by mail that if I did not choose to address her as "Mom" it would have to be "Dr. Hartman." A few years later, Douglas happened to be visiting when Dad and Evelyn got word that I was among those included in the mass arrest of civil rights demonstrators in Jackson Mississippi. He reported that Evelyn's first concern was about the effect of my arrest on the family name.

Like most sons I wanted my father to be proud of me, and that meant going as far as I could go in college. In choosing between the University of Wisconsin in Madison and the University of California at Berkeley for graduate school, a key factor in my decision to come to Madison was that here I could go straight for my Ph.D., while at Berkeley I would have had to pick up a Master's degree along the way. When I finally finished working on my doctorate it was with the feeling that it had been more for my father than for myself. Naturally I informed him of when I would be graduating. His response was that he did not wish to come to the ceremony, but that he would like me to send him a photograph of myself in my graduation robe. With no family coming, I opted to not participate in the ceremony, so naturally there was no photo to send.

Grandparents

My father's first wife died in 1934, leaving him with 2 young children. He married my mother in 1935, and holiday visits with her parents and siblings in Delhi Ontario became a regular thing as shown in some of the photos at http://loonfoot.com/Leonard/LeonardScrapbook/FILES/photos/Leonard-Park/M.htm. My father's mother had died in 1935, and although his father remarried in 1940 we had relatively little contact with that side of the family. I don't recall grandparents on either side of the family engaging in storytelling with us kids. The large holiday gatherings in Delhi must have been a bit hectic and the visits to my paternal grandfather in Fairground Ontario were probably brief. After our move to the U.S. my mother told me about the financial hardship of her parents, encouraging my empathy with her father as the provider. I sent him small gifts of money at Christmas.

There is a photo somewhere showing my paternal grandfather, Watson Park, holding me as a baby. His first name was the maiden name of his maternal grandmother, and it was given to me as my middle name. From childhood visits to his home in Fairground my strongest memory is the powerful smell from his barn one year when he was raising hogs. I don't recall any personal interaction with him. After he died I was the one who took the phone call about his death, which I passed on to my father when he got home from work. I inherited the fiddle he had made and played at local dances for years, probably because we shared the name Watson. It hangs on the wall of our bedroom (right). Inside WATSON PARK is stamped on the wood above a glued on slip of paper bearing the printed date "1896." Watson's second wife was present on our visits, but I don't recall her interacting with us kids. I don't think my father approved of her, and that may have kept her in the background. She wrote me once after Watson died and I responded, but I never heard from her again. Her one letter is posted here.

The photo at left below shows me at age 2 with my maternal grandfather, William. The photo at right shows an Easter visit when I was 5. Our family was joined by 3 of my mother's siblings and one daughter. Our most memorable visit was when grandfather introduced me to driving. I was allowed to drive his big old Dodge around in circles in front of the building that may have served as his garage. He also let me turn the key to start the car when he was driving us on a little trip to the post office in town. I was looking forward to doing that again when he came out of the post office, and had taken the car out of gear in preparation for that. However, I failed to mention that when he was once again in the driver's seat and I reached for the key. He angrily scolded me, telling me that turning the key could make the car lurch forward. I was too humiliated to explain that I knew that, and that I had taken the car out of gear to avoid that. Grandmother was less outgoing than her husband, and I don't recall any personal interaction with her. Their Delhi house always smelled of baking bread when we visited. I have no doubt that I enjoyed eating her bread fresh from the oven. She seemed to be a stern woman, but I never had a negative encounter with her like that described by my sister. In Little Sparrows Fall Betty says grandmother "told me that if I didn’t behave that she’d not want me for her granddaughter."

Uncles and Aunts

Of the various aunts and uncles, the one I was closest to was my mother's brother Wesley, the youngest of her siblings. Of particular interest to me as a young person was his big Indian brand motorcycle with the sidecar he had made for it. I remember a camping trip with him on which he felt, to be safe, it was necessary to fry the bacon until it turned black. I followed, with interest, his trip around the world between 1951 and 1957. When he was in the British Solomon Islands he arranged for a young man there to start correspondence with me as a pen pal.

I also enjoyed spending time with my father's brother Clifford. He had a cheerful, outgoing personality and a good sense of humor, good qualities for a minister of the United Church of Canada, his occupation for more than 50 years. I remember having a meal with him at his Ontario apartment. He used a very short grace which he found amusing: "Good food, good meat, good Lord, let's eat." His wife was clearly less amused, but did not comment. That was probably the same visit during which I recorded the interview of Clifford that can be heard here.

The summer after our mother died my father arranged for my 2 younger brothers and me to spend the summer on the Manitoba farm of my uncle Etheridge, getting us out of the way as he courted Evelyn. I became an unpaid 15 year old farm hand, assigned a series of chores. Perhaps I was regarded as earning our keep (for myself and my two younger brothers). We did not spend the whole summer there. I made a joke at the dinner table that my aunt took offense at. We were soon shipped to Winnipeg to spend the rest of the summer with an aunt there. The reason my aunt was given was something different. My parents had been sending outgrown clothing to the farm family for their children. I had mentioned to their boy that the distinctive shirt he was wearing used to be mine. I guess he had never been told where it came from. He evidently talked to his mother about it and she talked to our aunt in Winnipeg, perhaps making it sound like I had been making fun of her son, which I had not. (That son ended up becoming a lawyer.)

What did I gain?

Learning by their example, here are some ways these elders have impacted my life. My mother provided an example of endless supportive patience, and empathy for others. (I'll write more about her later.) My father instilled my work ethic, and showed how to be a handyman, fixing whatever the family needed fixing. He and my uncle Wesley displayed the virtue of frugality. My uncle Clifford showed a warm, cheerful approach to life which was lacking in the father I knew. My stepmother Evelyn showed how destructive an intensely self centered personality can be in a family, providing a good example of how not to parent once I became a parent myself.

Negative memories generally seem to persist longer in my mind than positive ones. I don't believe in heaven, hell or reincarnation. In reality, the only afterlife I believe we have is in the memories and influences we leave behind in the people who have known us, and in the resulting changes in the way they live and interact with others that have affected people who have known them. I hope to leave behind some persistent positive memories in those who have known me.

This Little Prompted Story is one I am adding to the Park Family Scrapbook, this family history website that I have been working on since 1999. I hope that my letters, poems and stories contained here provide some insight into who I have been, and that the website will be valued and carried on by other family members. I'd like to be known as someone who made a conscious decision to put family ahead of career, and as someone who viewed employment in the public sector as a higher calling than working in the private profit-motivated sector. I hope to be remembered for devotion to environmental goals both in my work at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and in my private life. During my retirement years (since 2006) I'd like to be remembered for my volunteer work with the Humanist Union of Madison and with our low power radio station, WIDE-LP, where I have helped keep progressive ideas on the airwaves.

Finally, to hear positive things that I could be remembered for, talk to my wife Barbara while she is still around. She has always had a wonderful knack for seeing the positive side of things. I have been happily married to her since July 11, 1981 (a date we both routinely forget each year). The annual event we do remember is our birthdays on February 10 and 11. We celebrate that with a Musicale to which all the nearby musicians we know are invited to perform. I may be the one who originally came up with that idea, but it is something very positive we can both be remembered for.

As mentioned in story 6, Work You Can Believe In, I was first hired by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to work at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources as a state assignee. That meant that, while I had office space with the other DNR employees, I got paid by the EPA and got to take federal holidays, some of which were working days for state employees. When it was clear that the DNR was going to hire me I resigned from federal employment early to be able to spend the summer helping out at the farmette north of Barneveld where I was living with my first wife Debbie. She was pregnant with my oldest boy, Robin. We planned for me to start work at the DNR in time for my state employee health insurance to take effect 4 weeks before his due date. As it turned out, Robin did not wait for his due date. He arrived 5 weeks early, and we had to pay out of pocket all the maternity costs which the health insurance would have covered. 

The Bureau at the DNR where I was employed was the Bureau of Air and Solid Waste Management, and I was in the Air Section. (It later became the Bureau of Air Management.) The Bureau had something new for employees to use, a desktop computer (just one for the whole air section). Until then I had only used Vic 20 and Commodore 64 computers. The opportunity to learn how to use this different, more powerful kind of computer was one of the things I looked forward to. It soon became obvious that such computers would make it possible for the state to do more with fewer employees, and before long everyone in the Air Section in the central office had his or her own network connected computer.

As my responsibilities evolved I became the Rules Coordinator for the state air program. With limited staff, this air program was largely confined to implementing federal requirements. Federal air quality standards had been set for the so-called criteria pollutants - carbon monoxide, lead, ground-level ozone, particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide, and sulfur dioxide. State statute made the DNR the agency responsible for promulgating rules to control these pollutants, by monitoring for them in the ambient air and by issuing permits to proposed air pollutant sources with the restrictions necessary to protect air quality. 

Federal regulations to control toxic and hazardous air pollutants were relatively slow in coming, and any state effort to get ahead of the feds was a hard to sell. There were always state legislators focused on business development who were quick to raise the alarm whenever a major polluter threatened to move to another state where air regulations were more lax. A class of major polluters who could not move were the coal fired power plants. They had to meet federal sulfur dioxide (SO₂) requirements, and that involved stack testing by our monitoring staff to determine how much SO₂ they were sending up their smoke stacks. What they had never been required to control was the toxic pollutant mercury. Tests by DNR wildlife staff were showing more and more mercury in fish, making them unsafe to eat. The state's coal fired power plants were implicated as the biggest source of mercury in the air which rain brought down to the state's lakes. Eventually the coal fired power plants had to limit their mercury emissions by using coal with a lower mercury content. 

A pollutant that could not be effectively controlled through requirements imposed on large sources was carbon monoxide. In urban areas this pollutant came mostly from motor vehicles. Eventually EPA developed an "indirect source" control program that states were expected to implement. This involved placing requirements on traffic generators such as new shopping centers, and reviewing plans for such sources was one of my responsibilities. On one occasion I met with representatives of a consulting firm that was presenting its plans for a proposed indirect source. Their experience in developing such plans may have come from work in another state where indirect source requirements were more lax either in the state requirements or in how well those requirements were enforced. In any case, I pointed out shortcomings in their plans. A rumor reaching me later was that someone with the consulting firm had been fired after our meeting. The other approach to controlling motor vehicle emissions was a federal program placing vehicle emission limits on all new vehicles. As old vehicles were replaced by new ones over time the indirect source review program became less needed. It was phased out after my retirement from the DNR. 

Ozone was another pollutant that could not be controlled by placing emission limits on the smokestacks of major sources. It is created in the atmosphere through the reaction of precursors such as the hydrocarbons that evaporate from fuel storage tanks. Rules had to be developed for such tanks. 

Another class of pollutants that air staff discussed was chemicals that persist in the environment and accumulate in the bodies of humans and other animals. Such chemicals were contained in firefighting foam and such foam was being used to put out fires set on purpose to give practice to firefighters. I guess that practice was phased out but the problem has only recently come to wider public attention, under the acronym PFAS, as the chemicals have been found in drinking water around the state. Without leadership from the EPA, state rules to limit PFAS in the environment seemed out of reach during my time with the DNR. 

My DNR responsibilities eventually expanded to include Quality Assurance Coordination (with some oversight of the air monitoring program) and Technical Guidance Coordination for staff via our computer network. However, my primary role in the Bureau of Air Management remained Rules Coordinator.